Beauty inside and outside

I got out to the cabin for the first time in months on February 16. The whole week had been what some would call a tease. A hint of spring. A preview. I went out after a couple of near 50 degree days and bright sun, and I didn’t even have to turn on the heater. In just those few days, the cabin had lost her refrigerator chill. I don’t know what it is about that particular kind of chill. Maybe, even when you’ve never been in a morgue, it strikes you as a place not fit for the living – and I just don’t like it.

But I didn’t find it! The warmth was the biggest surprise. I was so grateful for it and to be there…in it.

But you know what I didn’t see until today? Until I captured the pictures I took that day? It was the dichotomy between the inside and the outside.

All I really did that day was sit a while, take some pictures, and sweep the cabin out. When I saw the picture of the broom, and the pictures of the snow, it just struck me. It was beautiful outside the cabin and beautiful inside – but the beauty was so different.

I thought – maybe we’re like that.

When things get shaken up

There's more new snow outside my window today, and like much of the rest of the country, we keep setting records for it. Henry described it this morning (he was home with a cold) as looking like tiny mirrors as he gazed out at all it buried.

Since last I wrote we've had countless inches of snow, two birthdays in the family (me and Henry) and Angie graduated from Aveda school one week and started a new job/training program with Juut Salon the next. In the midst of this her car died and mine, though in need of some major repairs (that I only just learned of when taking her in for an alignment), is momentarily her wheels. Small potatoes in the scheme of things, but it's made for an interesting few weeks.

To keep myself centered through those things, and for other reasons of need for comfort and insight when my quiet time has been less than usual, I found myself turning to the beliefs laid out in The Treatise on Unity and really digging into them as the practices they're stated to be.

Since I've recently posted my alternate blog http://pubjournal.blogspot.com to my Amazon page, I decided to share some of what I'm finding there. So just in case you're looking for something too, I thought I'd mention it. I'm just getting started so there's not much to see, but my intention is to share what I'm finding over coming weeks.

Looking for something is such an odd thing. I don't often know what it is I'm looking for when I find myself vaguely entering search mode. Actually, some really cool things have been happening -- odd feelings of switches in direction, surreal moments of dreaminess, shifts in the flow. I don't know about you, but I kind of welcome the disconcerting. When I feel things starting to get shaken up I get excited. I enjoy the feeling of "What the heck is going on?...Now what's happening?"

I can't really trace why these feeling sent me to The Treatise on Unity and those practices, but as near as I can recall it was as if I suddenly remembered they were there!

Since I don't generally talk about my vocation with A Course of Love too specifically on the blogs, this is a new direction in itself. I'm curious about where it will go. And I like being curious too.

Hubris

I got a comment back on this quote from my last posting –

“Nothing happens by accident and the observation of this will help to put the responsibility of your life back into your hands, where it belongs. You are not helpless, nor are you at the whim of forces beyond your control. The only force beyond your control is your own mind.” (A Course of Love, 10.17)

What is meant by this – the mind is the only thing beyond our control? Who’s into control anyhow? I told the woman who wrote asking about it, “I liked the quote because that’s the way it feels so often…that the only thing I can’t control is my mind, even pardon the word “control.” I also said, “It’s a quote from early in A Course of Love. You wouldn’t find it in The Dialogues.”

That was this morning. As I’m writing this, here at the end of the day, I’m cracking up about my light treatment of that quote, and about how it whacked me on the side of the head a little while ago.

I was on-line half the day, which had me getting tight around my ears and in my gut and had my back acting up.

This all began because I convinced myself (and with good reason I might add) that it’s time to change a few things I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time. Okay? Are you with me…and that certain determination you can get?

Yesterday, I set up a new e-mail address so that I could change the one I’ve had forever (mari@thedialogues.com), the one that gets about a hundred spam messages a day. (The new e-mail is acourseoflove.center@gmail.com.)

Today I figured I had to let people know about the change and started manually writing down the email addresses from my Outlook account. I got to page five of that and I was so bored I could have cried, and pretty certain too that there was an easy way to do it that I didn’t know about.

So, I switched gears for a while to investigate whether to try to move my website (www.acourseoflove.com) somewhere where it would actually get updated, or let it go and build a new one where I can add updates myself.

By the end of the afternoon I was afloat in information.

Meanwhile, I’m aware that there’s a brouhaha of sorts over a 1994 video of Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric talking about the Internet, basically asking “What is it anyway?” In 1994! And now we have blogs, forums, on-line education, internet radio, iPods, apps, Wiis, RSS feeds, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wiki and more words I don’t understand than I can repeat.

Even when I get the information I’m looking for, I don’t know what to do with it, and so after a few hours, I save a page or two of my research to my Favorites and then go take all the photos and magnets and business cards and clipped cartoon frames off the fridge and spray it down with Windex in glad rejoicing. Here is something I can actually do. Here is an idea I can implement. I happily rearrange the photos and put up new ones I got with Christmas cards, and throw away some older ones, and the grocery list written a month ago. When done, I stand back and enjoy the order and symmetry of an idea hatched and carried out in an hour.

Then I go back to my computer.

I have, like most of us, all kinds of ideas. Developing the know-how to implement them is not fun.

I was reading about another media frenzy over the Tiger Mom book. It said that Asian Moms know that nothing is fun until you know how to do it. I immediately started thinking about Angie, just graduating from Aveda school, and how learning to cut, color, set, and otherwise handle hair was no jolly good time, but that she’ll hopefully soon have a job and a fun career.

Then I thought of how my son, now nearing 40 years old, told me recently that I should never have let him quit gymnastics. I still remember fighting to get him away from Saturday morning cartoons and how I finally put it to him one day: “If you’re going to fight me every week about going, I’m going to forget it.” He was probably all of four years old.

So I’m contemplating all this and getting more agitated by the minute.

Without a Tiger Mom breathing down my neck, I’d become my own Tiger Mom. I wasn't giving myself any choice.

But I need to have a choice in my sunroom on a Sunday afternoon -- a choice about how I spend my day. I need to remember that I do…have a choice. When I get myself worked into a frenzy of “have to,” I need to take a deep breath and slow down, even while I keep going. I have to remember, as my friend Mary told me the other day, “One step at a time.”

So I guess I’m just saying that there it is again – in a roundabout, insidious way – all that is beyond my control is my own mind. It’s was almost as if my hubris of the morning came back to bite me.

It’s not always that we’re thinking negative thoughts or that we’ve got chatter going on as we meditate, or that we’re creating scenes of gloom and doom in our future, or that we’re in fear instead of love. It’s far more often about the dumb stuff.

I knew what I was doing to myself, and still, for those hours, just kept right on doing it, as if I was addicted to a video game rather than needing to find that first step that I needed to find. I was not in control of my mind. I wasn’t even thinking.

There’s no real moral or anything like that to this story. Just an admission I guess, and with it, a little lightness has returned. And the computer is about to be shut off for the night.

Learning and listening

There was an amazing sunrise this morning. I don’t know if I’ve noticed one in weeks. It was spread out across the horizon, from front yard to Thompson Avenue. It was so vibrant that Henry noticed it when he got up and came to find me and we sat on the floor in the dining room, observing. One thing he still hasn’t gotten is how to describe things. He’ll ask, Umma, what’s that? and I have no idea what he’s referring to. This requires patience on both our parts, but it’s interesting when looked at as something you slowly develop – like the way he didn’t say “me” or “mine” until he was two. He referred to himself as Henry. “That’s Henry’s ball.” Then with the two’s came the personal identification of himself as a self, and now, just days shy of four, I guess I’m awaiting his use of descriptors while marveling that this doesn’t yet come naturally to him. He talks up a storm but still isn’t quite able to identify things specifically. Or else he thinks I should simply see what he sees. What else is there but what he’s referring to or pointing at?

It’s gotten me fascinated with the way we learn – not enough so to scour the books that lay it all out, but enough to witness and note what’s going on with my grandson and to ponder it all a little bit.

I notice how I explain things to him too. Just last night, talking of his birthday, he was asked where he came from. I tell him he’s from heaven. His mom tells him he’s from her tummy. We say, “You came from heaven and arrived through your mom’s tummy.”

He told me one day that the second heaven floats.

I listen.

Technology, change, and responsibility

You know how it is when you wake up one morning and wonder where you’ve been? It seems to me that something peculiar happened to mid January. Starting about at Martin Luther King day and going on to Obama’s state of the union, and including Yemen, Tunisia and Egypt. What the heck happened? It just gave me the feeling like you can turn around and suddenly the world has changed while you weren’t looking.

Technology and change. It’s unfair to bind the Middle Eastern revolts to technology alone, or to lump Obama’s speech, (with so much given over to the new technological world) in there with it, but this theme jumped out at me after having been more sequestered than usual.

I did watch the State of the Union with all that language of “winning” feeling not like Obama but like Obama catering to the America public. There’s that desire to be winners again. To be better than the competition, more pioneering, more innovative, more affluent. To not let the status of our leadership and our image in the world wane.

President Obama’s words meant more to me when he acknowledged that so many of us feel as if we’ve woken up in a new world, and that there’s cause. There’s been this technological revolution. Things are different now. (I’d add, here, that the difference is not only due to technology! The technology that connects the world, is, as my friend Mary pointed out to me many years ago, only possible because it’s happening within us. Our possibilities and dreams become the world’s possibility and dreams.)

And so you’ve got the youthful protestors organizing via Twitter and Facebook.

Egypt’s youth claim a generation gap. They see those governing as only acting to preserve themselves. They claim no allegiance to anything but change. They realize they have to do it themselves.

In a corresponding news article, one official noted that there is no longer the hope in America that there once was – the hope in America as an outside rescue operation.

Could this be a good thing?

This is kind of my conclusion after feeling as if I’m coming out of a cocoon in which in some way the same thing’s been happening within me. I’ve been focused on some things that are important to me with the feeling of “It’s up to me” And I’ve been more diligent about watching where I rush in to rescue those who need to do for themselves.

The feeling of the whole world being caught in a similar time of change is keen…as if we’re beginning to get a new notion of where we are and how to proceed.

It’s harder in one minute with news of protests turning violent and police and civilians being killed, easier in the next with hopeful signs of military sympathies lying with the protestors. As one analyst said, the beginning of a revolt can be exciting and romantic, but it doesn’t last. It gets harder and more violent.

I suppose that’s the thing about revolt. There has to be such a sustained inner desire and hope for change that you don’t give up.

It all reminded me of a quote from A Course of Love (10.17)”

Nothing happens by accident and the observation of this will help to put the responsibility of your life back into your hands, where it belongs. You are not helpless, nor are you at the whim of forces beyond your control. The only force beyond your control is your own mind.